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“Why am I meeting with you guys?" It was the spring of 2005, just three weeks into Mark Hurd's tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and product design was not at the top of his list of priorities. Hurd was consumed with the monumental task of restructuring a company with more than 150,000 employees in 170 countries and making operational efficiency a cornerstone of the tech giant's competitive strategy.

The ponytailed Sam Lucente, who'd become HP's first-ever vice president of design two years earlier, was in the hot seat. He flashed a slide that showed dozens of HP logos, each created by a different team within the company. The next slide was of a single logo, crafted by his corporate design crew, that could be used everywhere. Lucente predicted that when 500 million of the new "jewel" logos were shipped, the company would have saved roughly $50 million in development and manufacturing costs.

"Now," replied the boss, "you've got my attention."

Lucente argued that design could achieve equally impressive results with HP's software, product controls, packaging, enterprise systems, even parts of its supply chain. He promised senior management what he now describes as "tens of millions" in additional savings. Hurd gave his backing to Lucente's plan to ramp up the companywide design practice.

These days, conventional wisdom holds that good design is indispensable for differentiating products, building brands, and forging new markets. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of major corporations--from IBM to Whirlpool--that have named vice presidents of design or chief design officers, some of whom report directly to the CEO. Few developments more clearly demonstrate the rising power of design in corporate circles.

But it's one thing to win backing for a big design initiative from the CEO, who is thinking about the entire company. It's something else to get executives and managers who run specific business units to embrace corporate design edicts. HP has scores of business units organized into three main divisions--personal systems such as desktop and notebook PCs; imaging and printing; and software and servers--each with its own P&L. The company's 250 designers report to the heads of their particular business units, who are used to operating independently. Lucente may want to create companywide standards, but he can't necessarily enforce them.

As Satjiv Chahil, marketing chief for HP's $29 billion-a-year personal systems division (and former maestro of marketing at Apple, Sony, and Palm), says, "Corporate is the flag bearer for design. But this is where the rubber hits the road."

Clearly, the job of building a design practice that spans a global enterprise like HP is at least as much about management as it is about design. Lucente has taken on the task with a deft political hand. "At HP," he says, "it's all about persuasion--making our best effort and then letting people decide whether they want to take us up on it."

As they like to say in Silicon Valley, that is a nontrivial challenge. After all, the most toxic phrase in business management is, "I'm from corporate, and I'm here to help."